Boulder Revisited

This is the bagel shop I worked at for about a year and a half. Up every day at 5 am ('time to make the bagels'), I staggered into this place, by the back door, and ruled like a tyrant over my food prep area.

I am writing this post in a Best Western a few blocks from the bagel shop (or as my friend and former co-worker Eric likes to call it, "The Bagel Hut"). One block up and across 28th Street is a Target.

When my friend Drew and I first moved out here, we had no friends here, no jobs lined up, no place to live, so we slept in our sleeping bags just outside of town at the foot of the Flatirons, fending off cops, foxes, and morning dew. We spent a few days looking at apartments and applying for jobs. City Street Bagels pretty much hired us on the spot and we were to begin working immediately: Drew as counter help, me as the prep guy. I did everything from prepare the dough for the bagels to making a variety of cream cheeses (which I do not eat, and thus I never, ever taste-tested my own whippings) to slicing tomatoes and onions and turkey for the lunch crowd. The night before our first day I went into Target (across the street) and purchased a cheap alarm clock to wake us up at 430 am so we could sneak into a park and use their showers before anyone woke up and was the wiser.

Drew didn't last long at City Street Bagels; I held on until March 1999.

Being back here reminds me of all the reasns why I loved this place; conversely, it reminds me of exactly why I left. I have a lot of great and not-so-great memories tied to this place and I am grateful I had the opportunity to come here in the first place and grateful for the opportunity to revisit.

I haven't eaten a bagel since I left here 7 years ago. Eating 5 to 7 of them a day will do that to you. But I also have not hiked in the mountains since I left, and I miss that tremendously. The Rocky Mountains make this grown man well up a little. Hopefully tomorrow I will get off my lazy sit-in-front-of-the-computer ass and make my way to the trails I once knew.

The gathering flab concurs with this hope.